Mislaid

I was a big fan of Nell Zink's runaway success, The Wallcreeper (my review).  I paid cold cash for a hard cover book (something I haven't done for ages) to read Mislaid right away.  It was ok.  Not great.  But also brilliant.

First I should say I think Nell Zink is such an interesting character, and I doubt I'm the only one who secretly wishes she and I could have an intense email relationship like she supposedly still has with J. Franzen whereby she tells me fantastic books I should read and somehow, I guess, she thinks I'm pretty interesting too.  And then we make jokes about how bourgeois it is to be written up in the New Yorker. (But, really, you should read the article.)

Mislaid has a lot of brilliant lines.  One thing Zink certainly excels at is effortlessly weaving in lots of Big Themes - in this case: race, higher education, wealth, The South, destiny, queer identity, expressions of knowledge and like, a million other things.  Look, I'm mildly embarrassed that I actually know very little about lit theory (I got a useless art history degree instead of a useless lit degree) so I'm merely pretty sure about this... but I think that Mislaid is mostly, if not completely, satirical.  As such, everything was wry and distant and I never felt too invested in any characters since I was seeing everything through a smirk.

A few months ago I made a hairbrained guess about what I thought this book would be about after reading the synopsis and was way off.  In Mislaid, Peggy marries Lee (both are gay) and they have 2 children.  For really no good reason, Peggy runs off with the daughter and lives with her in utter squalor for about a dozen years as two black people (They are both white. And natural blondes.)  Many absurd things happen and then the most absurd thing happens and then, ta da: everything pretty much works out ok. I suppose I might be grouchy about it if I didn't absolutely guffaw through the last 100 pages. Zink flings so many zingers there's nary a soul or institution that walks away unzung.

Something that struck me about both Zink's books is how slender and yet all-encompassing they are.  She's concise in her acerbic wit but doesn't spare words either. After a page-long description of the local dump (compared to Dante's Inferno, natch), she writes: "Mayonnaise is an irresponsible splurge when you don't have a fridge, but there are small sizes available, especially in places where people live hand to mouth and 'large economy size' is regarded as a long-term investment that would tie up needed capital."

I can't wait to read her next book.  Since she supposedly wrote both these books in a matter of weeks it might not be long.